


All These Feelings

by triggerswaggiehavoc



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Awkward Crush, Crushes, Fluff, Fluff and Humor, Humor, M/M, Secret Crush
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-28
Updated: 2018-02-28
Packaged: 2019-03-25 04:19:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13826340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/triggerswaggiehavoc/pseuds/triggerswaggiehavoc
Summary: Chan knows exactly what he's feeling.





	All These Feelings

Chan sees Seungkwan for the first time when he is a freshman in high school. His geometry teacher has a son in the school choir, so she offers extra credit on the final to every student who shows up to the winter chorus concert. Chan has never been too great at math, so he shows up. Most of his classmates have the same idea.

While he waits for the concert to begin, he thumbs through the program. The freshman choir, the show choir, the honors choir, the jazz choir, the men’s choir. So many choirs. He notices every soloist has a special note below the piece in which they’re featured, name and year and school, and he skims through reading all of them. Senior, senior, senior, senior. Sophomore. His eyes flick back. There’s only one sophomore with a solo? Chan figures that means he must be pretty good. He notes the song’s position in the lineup and waits for it.

Something moves in his stomach when the song starts, and he looks among the members onstage and tries to guess who it might be. It’s the honors choir, so he figures someone who’s still an underclassman should stand out a little bit as younger, but none of them do. When the song bridges, one boy steps forward to take the microphone. After a measure of instrumental, he comes in for the solo.

Chan doesn’t particularly like the phrase ‘love at first sight.’ Looking at someone isn’t enough to know that you love them, and he has always thought so. But he does believe that there are some things you can feel at first sight, and one of those things is love, even if it isn’t aimed at the person you’re seeing. Chan listens to him sing, and he thinks he understands what love feels like even if he’s not certain he’s feeling it. When the song ends, he checks the program again for the name. Seungkwan. He notices a tear beading in the corner of his eye and wipes it away quickly.

After that concert, Chan feels like he sees Seungkwan everywhere. He’s leaving the cafeteria when Chan is entering it. He’s by the bookstore when Chan goes to buy a pen. He’s going to his locker when Chan is walking through the hall. It’s like when he learned what the word ‘ambivalent’ meant and suddenly started seeing it in everything he read, but worse. Namely in that a crush on the word ambivalent didn’t start blooming beneath his ribs like it does with Seungkwan.

He does notice that he’s got the same friend around him a lot. From a distance, he seems a little scary, but he’s in Chan’s Spanish class, and sometimes he’ll tell a joke so bad the teacher threatens to write him up, so Chan guesses looks aren’t everything. When they change seats for the fourth quarter, they’re put beside each other, and Chan believes in luck. Seungkwan’s friend taps him on the shoulder.

“Dude,” he whispers, brandishing his latest returned packet in hand, “what did you get on the last test?”

“Eighty-six,” Chan tells him. The boy’s jaw unhinges.

“For real?” He flips the papers in his hand so Chan can see the number circled in bright red at the top of the front page. “I got a forty! Do you think you can help me study?”

“Who’s talking in my classroom?” Señora Romero snaps, eyes pointed straight at him. He pretends to yawn and shields his face with his test, but he looks right back at Chan as soon as she stops eyeing him.

“Sure,” Chan whispers. “I’m Chan, by the way.”

“Oh, sweet. You’re awesome. I’m Vernon.” Chan acts like he didn’t already know that.

It’s not until the next year when he really meets Seungkwan. Vernon winds up in Chan’s Spanish II class—“Would you believe my luck!”—and they’re at Vernon’s house doing the first of many excruciatingly long homework packets when Seungkwan shows up. He’d thought his little crush was finally starting to simmer down, but seeing Seungkwan again after going the whole summer without sets him at a rolling boil again. He looks a little bit different. More handsome, somehow. He walks in the front door like it’s his own house and Vernon looks up at him like it’s normal.

“What’s up?” Vernon says.

“I thought you wanted to play Mario Party today,” Seungkwan tells him with a frown. His talking voice and his singing voice are so different yet so similar, and Chan is suddenly dizzy.

“Not right now,” Vernon grumbles, turning back to his homework with a glare. “We can after I finish this packet.” Seungkwan snorts.

“You do homework now?”

“Hell yeah, I do, since Señora Vasquez takes it up.” He nudges Chan in the arm with his elbow, and Seungkwan looks at him for the first time. Chan tries his best to keep his cheeks from burning up, but he can still feel them. “Chan is totally gonna help me get an A.”

Seungkwan hums and slides around to look over the homework with glassy eyes (he takes French, Vernon later explains, around turn eight or nine of Mario Party). After a quiet minute of appraisal, he leans close to Chan’s ear and whispers, “On a scale of one to ten, how bad is he at Spanish?”

Chan dislodges all vital organs from his throat before he whispers back, “Really bad.” Seungkwan guffaws.

“I like you already,” he says. For one minute, Chan does not breathe. When he finally starts back up, air doesn’t feel like enough.

Somewhere between games of Smash and interjections on the subtle differences between French and Spanish words for things, Chan realizes he maybe might be really in love. Around the end of the semester, he goes with Vernon to the choir’s winter concert, and his chest is already clenched up at just the memory when they walk through the doors. Seungkwan’s name stands out like neon on the program, but Chan pretends to find it after a few seconds of searching. Of course he’s got another solo.

This time when Seungkwan sings, Chan has tears in his eyes, real and heavy, and he doesn’t notice them until Vernon is elbowing him in the side. He wipes them away from his face even though he knows it’s already too late to pretend they were never there.

“Dude, are you okay?” Vernon whispers.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Chan tells him, or tries to tell him, but he chokes on it and ends up just nodding instead. Vernon keeps looking at him.

“Are you sure?” Even though Chan nods again, Vernon still doesn’t look like he believes him. And he shouldn’t, but Chan still wants him to. He leans closer. “Is it something about Seungkwan?”

“I don’t wanna talk about this,” Chan whispers. The last of his tears leave salt where they dry on his face. Vernon doesn’t back up.

“Dude,” he breathes, “do you, like… like him?”

“I don’t wanna talk about this!” Chan repeats, nerves coming out like anger. Vernon takes the hint and backs off, but that doesn’t stop him from asking Chan again about it later. Eventually, he forces Chan to admit it; he's relieved to have it off his chest some way, but it stresses him out just as much to have someone else know.

“You know what?” Vernon tells him, gripping his shoulders. “You saved my life. I’ll do whatever I can to help you.” God, does Chan not want him to do that. But his mouth does not cooperate with his brain.

“Thanks.”

Vernon spends the next several months on unsuccessful attempts at getting Chan and Seungkwan together. The closest call is over the summer, when they go to the fair. All through the afternoon, they walk the grounds as a trio, and when they decide to join the despairingly long line for the Ferris wheel, Vernon goes missing. The worst part about Vernon’s schemes is that he never tells Chan when he’s about to put them into action. They are almost at the front of the line, setting sunlight falling all around them, and he is nowhere to be found.

“Sheesh,” Seungkwan huffs, still scanning the crowd behind them in vain. “You’d think he would pick a better time to go to the bathroom.” He swings his arm. “We’re almost about to go on it!”

“Should we, uh, hop out and wait for him?”

“No way.” Seungkwan grins. “He doesn’t deserve to have us wait for him, so we’ll just ride without him and rub it in his face later.” Fool! That’s exactly what he wants! “Besides, they probably wouldn’t let us just stand up there waiting, and there’s no way we’d get this far in line again.”

“I guess that’s true,” Chan muses. Seungkwan laughs.

“Don’t worry,” he says with a soft pat to Chan’s shoulder. He suddenly becomes aware of how sweaty he is and wishes he had put on more deodorant. “I don’t think he’s really gonna be that upset.” Chan knows he won’t, but that’s not why his heart is frozen between beating way too fast and not beating at all.

Before long, they climb into their little carriage, creaky and in need of a new paint job but rife with youthful nostalgia. Slowly, slowly, the wheel turns as the remainder of the gondolas are filled, and they are halfway up the side when it begins its gradual rotation.

Seungkwan sits backlit by the sun, and all the gold makes it hard to look that way, but Chan looks anyway. Summer sits so well on his skin, and he looks like something out of a dream in front of him, picking at the last bits of the funnel cake he smuggled on with them. He glances between Chan and his knees a few times, bashful smile curling his lips.

“Did you want some?” he asks.

“Huh?”

“The funnel cake.” He pinches a piece off and holds it up. “You keep looking at it.” Chan does not have the guts to say something like, ‘I’m looking at you.’

“Nah, I’m good.”

“Are you sure?”

“Super sure.”

“I see right through you, Channie.” Chan chokes, and Seungkwan wiggles the little scrap of fried dough in front of him, powdered sugar falling off as he does. “Here, I’ll give it to you. Say ‘ah.’”

“No way,” Chan sputters, but Seungkwan’s hand keeps getting closer, swirling in slow loops like a child’s broccoli airplane. He can feel his organs shutting down.

“‘Ah,’” Seungkwan repeats. Chan heaves a shaky breath.

“Ahhh,” he says, and Seungkwan pops the little piece of cake into his mouth with a small giggle. As he does it, Chan gets the sense that there is a bird nesting in his chest that’s decided to try and free itself after years of dormancy, wings beating and beak pecking in a fever to get out. It hurts like nothing else ever has.

“You’re so cute,” Seungkwan tells him with a big grin, and Chan thinks he’ll probably die sometime soon. For the rest of their ride, he can’t focus on anything but his heart rate and whether it’s healthy. It’s fully dark when they step off, and Vernon is waiting for them at the cotton candy stall twelve feet away, face eaten by a smile. When he asks Chan later what happened, he just sighs.

Come the end of December, the school decides that, for the first time since its founding, there will be a winter formal dance. Now a junior, Chan feels sickly reminders of his awkward time as a middle schooler, but against his better judgement, he still wants to go. He wants to go and he wants to take Seungkwan as his date and Vernon calls him on it two days after the first announcement.

“You totally want to take him, don’t you?” he says. Vernon isn’t taking Spanish classes anymore, but Chan still finds himself at Vernon’s house most afternoons, his own AP Spanish homework rotting in his backpack.

“Shut up.”

“Dude, I knew it,” Vernon cheers, slapping him on the back. “You’re so see-through. Just ask him.”

“Do you think he would say yes?” Chan asks, very much against his better judgement. Vernon shrugs.

“Maybe,” he answers. Not helpful. “I think he wants to go, and I bet he’d go with you. He likes you.” The way Chan’s entire body tenses up must be too obvious. “Wait, not like that. I mean, like, maybe like that. I dunno, dude.” He claps a hand on Chan’s shoulder. “You could tell him in the middle of a slow dance and see what he says. That’s romance.”

“Jesus Christ. No way.” Vernon rolls his eyes.

“You have no passion,” he mourns. “How am I supposed to get you guys together if you won’t even cooperate?” He sounds so weary. So Chan decides he’ll ask Seungkwan after all.

It’s a week later when Chan finally scrounges up the courage, which he knows is really less courage and more the awareness he’s running out of time. He strides up to Seungkwan’s locker with as much casual confidence as usual, but it peters out the second Seungkwan looks at him. He smiles. Chan’s insides are empty.

“What’s up, Channie?” he asks, sifting through the loose papers around his books. “Coming over to Vernon’s later?”

“Uh, yeah.” Chan coughs. “Actually, I wanted to, uh, ask you something.”

“Really?” When he turns his attention from the locker, Chan realizes how nervous he really is, and it hangs from his shoulders like lead. His fists clench and unclench at his sides. “What is it?”

“Well,” he starts, slow and shaky, “I was wondering,” and Seungkwan starts looking at him like he’s concerned, soft eyes and dampened grin, “if you maybe,” and he feels like everyone in the hallway is staring at him even though he knows they’re not, “would want to go to the winter formal,” and his lungs have stopped working, “with me.” Seungkwan stares at him.

“You want me to go to the dance with you?”

“Yes.” Chan inhales once, hard, but it doesn’t make him feel better. “If you want to.”

“Would you take me to dinner first?”

“What?” Sweat is dewing on his palms when he claps his hands together. “I mean, yeah, sure. If you want.”

Seungkwan hums and shuts his locker gently, leans against it while he thinks. His eyes are all the way on Chan now, and it’s stifling. “Well, it sounds nice,” he says, “but I don’t really want to go to the dance.”

“Ah.” Damn it. He should have known not to get his hopes up so high. It’s partially Vernon’s fault, anyway, for putting him up to it. Even though he didn’t really. While Chan burns alive, Seungkwan starts to laugh.

“You’re so cute,” he says. Then he leans closer, across the locker, and he is the only thing in the world. “Why don’t you just take me to dinner instead?”

“Huh?” He blinks at Seungkwan, but the picture doesn’t change. For a second, he considers pinching himself, but he decides not to. “Really?”

“Really,” Seungkwan tells him. “If you want to.”

“Definitely,” Chan says too fast. “I mean, I really… Yeah. I want to.”

“Great.” Seungkwan’s smile bleeds into his eyes. “I’ll be looking forward to it.” He rests his hand on Chan’s neck for a moment before leaving to head off down the hall, and it leaves a print of lava in its wake. Chan closes his eyes, and for a second, all he can think of is that if the first time he ever saw Seungkwan had been that just now, he might really have started to believe in love at first sight.  

**Author's Note:**

> happy snowflower day everyone!!! originally i was writing some good old fashioned kwaninoni but then i decided to go with this instead and im so much happier with it, and i hope you will be too!!! the tag for these babies is supremely desolate also so let's hope we see a lot more works for them soon!! be sure to check out everyone's snowflower fanworks, which will be posted now through the end of the month!! also personal update: if you follow me on twitter you know my computer is broken as of literally like 2 days ago (fortunately i had this draft saved in google docs) but this could mean fewer works from me for a while until i can get a new one. not everybody cares and i recognize that, but for the 1 or 2 people who do care, there's the tea!  
> anyway, thanks so so so much for reading, and i really hope you enjoyed! as always, feedback is greatly appreciated! see you!!


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